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Here's a view of the entrance with the reducer slide in it: it gets screwed with this side out into the window block with the holes lined up (the window block is essentially a block of wood filling the bottom of the window with a hole drilled into it). It was getting a bit of mildew, even though it doesn't really get exposed to the exterior, so I melted and rubbed some beeswax into it:

Re: My full size warre style observation hive

Here's a picture of the exposed window block. If I go into the hive in the summer, I don't leave this open - foraging bees will try to come home through it. Leave the entrance tube on and just slide the entrance reducer shut. Pull the entrance tube off the hive end and slide socks over the hive opening.

Reassembled the whole thing - bees were starting to come out of cluster so taking the sock off the hive opening and quickly reattaching the tube (it just slides on tightly) was a bit exciting. And now we can see the bees again!

Re: My full size warre style observation hive

This hive is now just over a year old.
We're really into spring here now with maples in full bloom and daily temps in the 60's.
Hive is very full in two boxes, plenty of capped brood visible from the sides in the upper box, just doing a bit of festooning in the lowest. No new comb getting built.
They have been capping some of the maple nectar they've been bringing in.
The floor of the hive is now whistle-clean.

The hive seemed kind of swarmy last week, with some frantic running around and lots of bees clustering outside on the window for a few days, but they've since stopped.
We had a big surge in hive humidity (water dripping everywhere one night) and I had to help the bees out a bit with the propolis ring they had built on the top vent. They had chewed it loose, but couldn't remove it through the wire mesh. I peeled it back and also poked a nail through the propolis filling the vent holes I had drilled all over the top of the hive. Humidity is now back to just a light haze some the evenings.

The swarmy behavior stopped just about when when I peeled back that propolis.

Re: My full size warre style observation hive

I have had the delight of listening to queens piping for about 5 days now.
The hive did swarm a couple of weeks ago - a huge swarm that I watched leave in a grand boil and was sorry not to catch. They settled way up in the highest tree and checked out but declined all my enticing little bait hives before lifting off again the next day. Here's the hive just before the swarm, seething with bees:hive-before-swarm.jpg

They're still full of capped queen cells and I saw a queen walking around a few days ago, so I'm guessing another swarm is about to occur. I saw the queen marching around on the capped queen cells, clearly interested, but didn't see her stinging at them or anything aggressive-looking. The piping makes it pretty easy to find the queen; I can hear several different queens piping, each with her own sound and rhythm.
Here's one of the queen cells. I can see five capped queen cells right now:queen-cell.jpg

Some of the bees are clustered on the window, and have been there since yesterday morning. I don't see a queen in there, nor do I see any comb. Not sure what's going on there.